Dear Ciao Bella

After a long hiatus, I have returned to make a post.

The following is an email that I sent to Ciao Bella, makers of the famed Blackberry Cabernet sorbet.

Observe: Blackberry Cabernet in all its glory.

Dear Ciao Bella,

In my greatest hour of need, I am turning to you for guidance.

My dear father recently turned 50. In a fit of mid-life-crisis panic, he ran to the grocery store to buy his favorite comfort food, Ciao Bella's Blackberry Cabernet Sorbet.

But alas, he returned home empty handed. After combing through the neighborhood's several grocery establishments, my father discovered the horrible truth-- there was not a single remaining container of Blackberry Cabernet Sorbet.

The family united in the quest to soothe my father's grief. We checked our grocery stores over and over again, but the effort was wasted. We bought Haagen-Dazs's Blackberry Cabernet sorbet, but it couldn't replace Ciao Bella's version. We even bought other Ciao Bella flavors, but nothing could compete with the smooth, rich tartness that is Blackberry Cabernet.

All seemed lost.

But then a light appeared in the fog-- icecreamsource.com sold Blackberry Cabernet, and it could be delivered right to our door! I surprised dear Father on his birthday with five cartons of his beloved sorbet, and you could see the weight lifted from his shoulders. He was a new man!

On the fateful night of August 20th, 2013, I went back online to re-order more sorbet. But I soon discovered the horrible truth; icecreamsource.com no longer carried individual cartons of Blackberry Cabernet! I spent the next few hours braving hellfire and brimstone, searching frantically through the deep folds of the internet for the elusive goddess of sorbet. But it was useless. There was no online store that could deliver Blackberry Cabernet to Northbrook, IL.

My father is having intensive surgery on his sinuses on September 12th, 2013. Please Ciao Bella, in this terrible age of hardship, I beseech thee: tell me how to find this incredible flavor. No matter the cost, no matter the danger, I must find a way to tame the beast that is Blackberry Cabernet.

Help me, Ciao Bella. You're my only hope.

Di te incolumem custodiant,

Beth Jeanne Silverstein

****************

In other news, "di te incolumem custodiant" means "May the Gods guard your safety" in Latin. Because I know how to use Google, bitches.

Review of Peas

This is going to be the most terrifying review I've ever written ever. It goes like this:


Once upon a time, there was a girl who went to some kind of community function for her former high school. It had refreshments and h'ors d'oeuvres that were supposed to be fancy, and then after the refreshments was a performance by a Beatles tribute band. They were called something related to the Beatles that I don't remember.

The girl and her parents and sister all went, and a waitress offered them a plate of mini chicken pot pies. This girl was not educated on anything food-related because she only liked foods that were the color beige. When she asked what was in the chicken pot pie, the waitress told her it had chicken and dough. Great, thought the girl, taking a large bite. What could be better than free food that was made out of dough?

As she took the first bite, her sister watched and elbowed their father in concern. The sister and father both had intense passions for food and cuisine knowledge, and so they knew about the other contents in the chicken pot pie. They watched as the girl looked at the other half of the pie that she still held in her hand, her eyes widening in horror. The chicken pot pie had more than just chicken. It had-- PEAS (and carrots)!

These peas are frozen. The ones in the pie were not frozen.

The girl looked at her family in panic. The unthinkable had happened... she had willingly consumed peas. Paralyzed with revulsion, she stared at the half of the pea that was still in the pie. She would rather have found half a worm. There were peas in her mouth. E gads!

Seeing the impending disaster and humiliation that the girl was about to bring upon the family, the sister acted fast. She grabbed the plate with the remaining pot pie out of the girl's hand, snatched her father's cocktail napkin from his hand, and thrust it in the girl's face, hissing, "Spit it out!"

And she did.

Yay!

The moral of this story: don't eat unidentified and/or suspicious foods. Also peas are the most disgusting food on the planet. I would rather eat a million units of flan than one pea (that's a big deal because I hate flan).

That was a falsehood, I would never eat flan. I feel nauseous just thinking about it.

Review: Stingrays

If you go to Sea World in Florida, they have another park called Discovery Cove. This is one of those places where you can swim with the dolphins and feed the sharks and whatever. It's fun because it's in Orlando, which is my favorite place on Earth. Like if aliens ever came to Earth, they should first go to Orlando. It is the pinnacle of the human species.

When you're at Discovery Cove, you can go on some kind of tour thing where they take you around and show you how to feed every single animal that they have. Mayhaps this is so that they don't have to pay people to feed the animals themselves. Instead, you pay them! Hurrah!

I'm getting so bored with this post THE POINT IS STINGRAYS. Anyone who wants to know more about Sea World can go look it up themselves. It's called Google, guys. Use it.

Hello sir.

Stingrays are like fish except flattened. It's as though someone took a steamroller to a regular fish and turned it into a stingray. An analogy: stingrays are kind of like the matzah version of a fish. The whole matzah thing is how apparently if bread doesn't have time to rise, it becomes dry and crusty and FLAT. Except crackers are usually not so bad and matzah is horrible and causes constipation.

Allow this diagram to demonstrate:

It just took me 3 days to figure out how to make that stupid diagram. Who knew computers were so complicated??



Really the whole point of this post is to say that stingrays hug you with their flaps, because they have these flaps instead of arms or fins or whatever, and if you go to Sea World and feed them, they will be all, "Thank you for feeding me this delicious food!" and they swarm up to you and rub their flaps on you and suck the foods out of your hands with the weird little vacuum-mouth that they have.

Observe.

FLAPS FLAPS FLAPS THE END.

Review: Dragonfruit

Imagine that one lovely morning, you get on a plane and travel to Thailand. You get off the plane, wander into the street, and decide to celebrate your arrival by trying some kind of new, exotic foods. You go up to a stall, and the guy sells you a beautiful pink fruit that looks like it's straight out of National Geographic. The guy tells you that this is a dragonfruit. This makes sense, since the outside has all these petal-flap-thingies that look kinda like dragon scales when you squint.

You sit down on the curb and break open the dragonfruit with a knife. I don't know where you got the knife. Maybe you stole it out of a suitcase at the baggage claim. Maybe you are Edward Scissorhands. Maybe you are a cyborg and used your laser-vision to slice it open.

Whatever method, you get the damn thing open. You look inside, and... HORROR MOVIE MUSIC!!!!!!!

What. The. Hell. Is. This.

This fruit is like one of those kitschy pictures of the fruits that look like other fruits on the inside, like on the outside it looks like an orange but it's sliced in half and they doctored the picture to look like a kiwi on the inside.

You see how this is a tomato on the outside but a kiwi on the inside? That kind of thing.

You feel like Alice in Wonderland. Except you're in Thailand, so it's more like Alice in Thailand. Do they even have dragonfruit in Thailand? I might have made that up.

But for real, this fruit/abomination hybrid proves that there is no God. Or if there is, then He is one sick, messed-up individual. You need help, God. From a professional.